Jazz culture at center of Worthington painter’s enigmatic works
To step in front of a Ron Anderson painting is to step into a story.
The artist’s big oil paintings are populated largely with AfricanAmerican characters who find themselves in the crowded jazz clubs, bars and restaurants of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.
In the motion-filled “Sundance,” for example, three dancing couples and three single women surround a trumpeter and a bass player. Every face that’s visible, however, is either stern or downright angry. What’s going on here?
Anderson — who has 25 paintings on view at the Shot Tower Gallery at Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center — isn’t saying.
“I don’t answer questions about what the paintings are about,” the Worthington-based artist said. “I think my paintings are openended. I think of them not as multiple choice but as essays. You’re given clues, and you come up with your own story. There’s no wrong or right answer.”
These lush and enigmatic paintings will be displayed through Dec. 14 as part of “A Point of Departure: The Work of Ron Anderson and a Celebration with Friends.”
Anderson, 67, recently retired after 26 years of teaching art at Fort Hayes and now paints full time.
Most of the exhibit pieces were created between 1993 and 2014. Reflecting Anderson’s love of jazz — especially the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane — they are painted in beautiful “Heaven and Hell” by Ron Anderson “Voodoo Zoo”
shades of amber, gold, brown, red and black. Anderson says they represent the “stop action of the human condition.”
In “Heaven and Hell,” a pianist plays an upright piano on the left side of the scene; on the right side, a seated man stares at a lighted match held in one hand instead of playing the trumpet he holds in the other. The flame becomes a focal point of the painting At a glance
and casts a glow on the man’s face as well as the beautiful woman standing beside him.
The largest painting is “Harlequin’s Dream,” stretching 18 feet wide and 5 feet tall. In it, Anderson paints himself as a trumpeter. (He plays badly, he says.) The mural also includes a pianist; a woman standing at the piano; a woman lounging in a chair; and, as the central figure, a harlequin, a recurring character in Anderson’s work who might be a trickster or a devil.
The masked individual is probably the latter in “Voodoo Zoo,” a crowd scene that may be Anderson’s version of “Dante’s Inferno.”
Another recurring character is a dancing woman based on Anderson’s friend China White, a former ballerina with Dance Theatre of Harlem and a faculty member at Fort Hayes. White has modeled for Anderson for years and appears in a number of paintings in this exhibition, including “Sundance” and “Heaven and Hell.”
After seeing his “Rock, Paper, Scissor” (1996) — an edgy painting of a knife fight breaking out in a club — White told Anderson that she wanted to be painted into some of his works.
Although the bulk of the exhibit features Anderson’s art, he included others by two friends: jazz-themed sculptures in wood and marble by Omar Shaheed and oil paintings by Bamazi Talle, including a portrait of Shaheed working with his sculpting tools.
These works — and especially Anderson’s paintings — complement the current focus on the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance celebrated in exhibits at the Columbus Museum of Art and other central Ohio venues. Anderson’s paintings especially seem to refer to and expand on the explosion of artistic expression of urban African-Americans of the 1920s and ’30s. His paintings are challenging, thought-provoking and beautiful.